When the Lord’s men laid a path for future dominance

Paul Edwards looks at Middlesex’s superb side of the 1970s where a certain Mike Brearley was showing all the signs of his supreme captaincy prowess

Mike Brearley seemed an unlikely revolutionary but he did his bit to bring down a hierarchy. There were no red flags, no barricades stormed and no blood running down the walls of Lord’s, but it happened all the same.
To understand the nature of this most civilised of coups we need to go back to 1965, three years after the abolition of the distinction between amateurs and p...